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Moritz Föllmer, "The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is Mortezo Hajizadeh, your host from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Moritz Vollmer about his most recent book that he has published with Cambridge in University Press. The book we're going to discuss today is called the Quest for individual freedom, a 20th century European history. Dr. Moritz Vollmer is Associate professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He's particularly interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany and also in the concepts of individuality and urbanity in the 20th, 20th century Europe. Moritz, welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:33]
C
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [02:36]
B
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us how the idea of this book came to you, what was the inception story of the book? And in a nutshell, maybe what's the book about? Just in three or four sentences before we delve deeper into some other concepts in the book.
- [02:53]
C
Yeah, I. This book actually has a long backstory, but I keep it short. Around 2000, I became interested in the idea to write a history of individuality across several key 20th century watersheds. Regime changes, war, post war period. And I did so in the first instance by writing a book on Berlin between Weimar and the Wall, which came out in 2013. And then I've had the idea for quite some time to write a 20th century European history through the prism of this history of individuality. But for a long time this seemed too broad. I didn't quite have the right angles, so I had other projects in between. But at some point it occurred to me that the quest for individual freedom would be the most promising way of approaching this. And I could sort of see the book emerging. And the book is. So that again, was sort of the beginning of quite the process of actually reading, writing, structuring, revising and so forth. But at some point I had the feeling that I was there and could afford to the risk to submit it to a publisher. And the book is in a nutshell about, I think, about how this quest for individual freedom played out across an entire century and across an entire continent, plus all the colonial spaces. Because European history doesn't just end at Europe's borders, wherever they may lie. And the key idea is that this was in many ways in taking place in adverse circumstances, sometimes against all odds. But it was a very kind of tenacious way of by many ordinary Europeans to sort of secure whatever little individual freedom was available to them. At the same time, individual freedom was also invested with enormously ambitious political agendas. And those could kind of stand in tension. Agenda is always collective, even though it also might appeal to individual freedom. But it might also, of course, then jar with the numerous kind of different understandings of the people this collective agenda is supposed to encompass, maybe serve. And yeah, so these key tensions between ordinary Europeans, questionable notion, but I think it's a useful sort of starting point. Attempts to secure individual freedom, to carve out a space for themselves and these ambitious political agendas. And then thirdly, all the things that happened in the 20th century. Wars, dictatorships, the end of wars, the end of dictatorship, colonialism. The end of colonialism eventually. So how that kind of intersected and played out, that's, in a nutshell, what my book tries to cover.
- [06:12]
B
It's a fantastic introduction, and we'll get to talk about. To kind of dissect different aspects of what you described here. Let me start by asking a narrative, a general narrative, that more or less people are familiar with it. And that's the narrative of the rise or sometimes the decline of the individual. You sort of challenge such teleological narratives about rise and decline of individuality. Why do you think these narratives continually persist and why? And what are the risks? What kind of risk do they pose on our understanding of the idea of freedom?
- [06:54]
C
Yes, these are very powerful narratives. So it's a very powerful idea to think that the individual rises. That's usually a critical narrative. Usually there's a lot of concerns about the social cohesion that then gets lost as a price of rising individualism. That's a very powerful way of making sense of social changes and transformations. But it's also very powerful to say, well, individuality becomes ever weaker because there are mass society, mass consumption, there are huge bureaucracies, there are political regimes that become more demanding compared to the 19th century, and that basically even squashes the individual. And there are ways of combining these. For instance, you can argue that a consumerist individuality rises and then more authentic, truer form of individuality declines in sort of in tandem. And that's a sort of powerful way of accounting for social theory, but. And accounting for social transformations. But I think that these kind of fall short of a convincing explanation because individuality, and that's in my book, and the quest for individual freedom meant very different things to different people. So it's very difficult to say that it either rose or fell or declined. Sorry. So it's very difficult to say that it either rose or declined. It's. What is more interesting to me is this interplay between different notions, different versions of this quest for individual freedom and the. How this kind of. Yes. How this, you know, stood in tension with collective experience, such as war and collective ambitions, such as massive kind of ideological agendas.
- [09:03]
B
And I think in the title of your book, there are two aspects that are important in the book. One is the idea of individuality, and the other one is the idea of freedom. And I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not, perhaps not surprised because, you know, you sort of. In such a book, you expect to see those names, but it's great that in your book you draw on George Simmel and also Isaiah Berlin's idea of individual freedom and use them to argue that freedom is subjective and unpredictable. It might be a good idea just to broadly describe how they approach the idea of individual freedom and then how their perspective or these perspectives that they discuss in the book help us rethink that idea of Freedom in the 20th century in Europe in particular.
- [09:57]
C
Yes, Djok Simmel is inspiring in that he very early on wrote that freedom is a matter of degrees. So it's not about saying people are free or they're unfree. They might be free in certain respects and to some extent, and might not be free in other respects. And also he was attentive to this kind of duality between a subjective dimension. People think of themselves as free or as unfree and want to change that and objective structural factors. And he was fundamentally also very much aware of ambivalence. So there's a social cost to more people defining themselves as free individuals. But that's not something we should principally deplore, as many others and social theorists have done. And that is something we should basically diagnose in a dispassionate way. And that has been very inspiring, as have a number of more recent sociologists whom I have hidden a bit in the footnotes of my introduction because I didn't want to overly complicated theoretical discussion. But for instance, Niklas Luhmann has had this very good idea of defining individuality as Anspruck's individuality. And ansprock translates as claim. So people make claims to be free individuals in the case of my book, and whether or not they're successful with these claims or disappointed, that remains to be sort of established. But in any case, these claims engender very important social effects. That's an idea that I've also encountered elsewhere, this term of claim making in the recent literature with regard to other claims. But that's a very valuable idea. And then while trying to conceptualize my book, I had the idea that freedom is very often defined against something. And that's also when this definition becomes more articulate, because if one takes something for granted, then it's usually seen as a natural freedom. For instance, a freedom to wear blue jeans. In the present day Netherlands, that's not articulated as a freedom because it's so much taken for granted. But in the 1950s, confronted with disapproving parents, or in the Eastern bloc, in Hungary in the 1960s for instance, or East Germany, the Soviet Union, these were important. Wearing jeans was an important part of defining oneself as free. So because it went against something in Both cases, the 1950s, disapproving parents, regimes that basically took a dim view of Western style consumption, even though they then also compromised with it. So, and defining freedom against something was what brought me to reread Isaiah Berlin. And Isaiah Berlin made this famous distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. It's the negative freedom basically defending a notion of the free individual against ideological engulfment and against state interference. And that's a liberal notion. It's been much criticized because Isaiah Berlin was of course, a Cold War liberal. And it has its limitations. So you could always say against these liberal notions of freedom that they're blind to all kinds of inequalities. But my take on it is that it's expandable. You can also say, okay, that's important. People often did feel that they needed to secure their freedom against state power. That's not a myth. But they also felt that they needed to defend their freedom to define themselves as free individuals against other forms of inhibitions or constraints, and for instance, those arising from military discipline, from factory discipline, from moral, especially gender norms. And if you include all this, then you can take up Isaiah Berlin's initial idea, use it, I think fruitfully, but also elaborate it, expand its scope to cover much more than what he had in mind back in the 1950s.
- [14:55]
B
And the one part of the book that I was really interested in, it was quite a fresh look at the idea of individuality and freedom was in your first chapter. That's where you talk about all the First World War and all the efforts that went into that sometimes propagandist efforts that went into the war to frame it as a voluntary endeavor, let's say, of military service, but at the same time, being a military service imposes restrictions and disciplines on you. And then you argue that there is a paradoxical relationship there. And military conflicts sort of exacerbated these disputes about the very meaning of freedom, but also paradoxically created a space for personal independence or freedom, especially for the females. Can you talk about this aspect, how war, the relationship between war and how it created that space for personal freedom?
- [15:52]
C
Yes, wars obviously involve massive constraints and certainly the total wars of the 20th century. So that needs to be stated in the first instance so as not to create the impression that they were in a sense, all about increasing the. The net amount of freedom in a society. Of course, they say conscripts, millions of young men. Conscription also means something very different because now it means actual participation in war and that's much more than military, peacetime military service. And many women also have to work. They have to work to earn a living in factories. They don't necessarily do it of their own volition and they sometimes even summoned to work. For instance, Germany during the First World War introduces basically a form of compulsory factory work for young women, which was often resented and resistant. All this said, it is sometimes there are unexpected opportunities in wars and wars have they try to enroll the entirety of society. Certainly that's the ambition during the First World War. But that also goes along with unintended effects. For instance, women working in agriculture now tended to leave for better paid factory jobs. And for them that expanded their opportunities, the very modest opportunities that were available to young women working in agriculture. And that was often seen as a demand for higher wages, lighter work and unlimited freedom. That's one of many disapproving quotes, basically a conservative discourse around agricultural interests. Of course they were afraid that they would run out of farm labor because these young women would all go off to factories. So that's not necessarily a reflection of how these kind of migrants to the cities, to the factories actually felt. But it's certainly important as a specter in the first instance, as something that raised a lot of concerns. And then it also depends, for instance, many women had to run farms if they were married to farmers because the farmers had to serve at the front. And that's a compulsory form, a very burdened form of self reliance. But we have letters from some women who sell things from. That's a quote from a farming woman in northern Italy. I did it all on my own. I didn't ask anyone. I wanted to do it by myself. Which means that she also didn't want to rely on the well meaning advice, uncles, for instance, on how to run a farm. So it's paradoxical. Wars do impose enormous constraints. And I haven't even approached the topic of enemy occupation, of course, especially occupation by Germany during the First World War, then again in the Second World War. But they also create disorder. So they open up unexpected spaces of opportunity. And that raises a lot of concern. And especially also of course, when it comes to the prospect of women entering sexual relations, romantic relations with enemy soldiers. That's a huge concern. Partly it's also reality. But the concern obviously is inflated. But it says something about these anxieties about precisely a war amounting to a loss of social, moral control.
- [19:53]
B
And especially I think it was also during the First World War where women had more even economic freedom to. And they got more into this social space, social arena. I mean they were more involved in there, which I guess came also with some questions about sexual freedom, which you just alluded to. And in some countries that was suppressed through. I don't know, I think through different policing regimes. But anyway, I'm kind of digressing.
- [20:26]
C
I guess yes, it could be something that was policed, of course policed by. There were punishments for entering relations with enemy soldiers or officers and then usually after the war, so repressions asshorn women after the Second World War. That's a prominent, very gruesome example of how of course a sense of collective guilt, of having perhaps compromised too much, of having not quite been heroic in the face of the German occupier in France, for instance. That was obviously shift. The blame was focused, shifted onto these women who were then publicly humiliated and basically branded as sinners by cutting and shaving their hair. So that's often something that the memory of these basis of freedom was in a sense suppressed in these general narratives of heroism of basically we were all. We couldn't all be heroes because the enemy occupied us and controlled us, which is in a way true. But it also oppresses or suppressed memory memories of these kind of short term shifts and these expansions of individual freedom. But at the same time, and also not everything can be suppressed. For instance, this idea of women making their own choices in crucial realms of their lives, that was simply stronger in the 1920s than before the First World War. Not all of it could be, could be curtailed or rolled back.
- [22:12]
B
Talking about economic freedom, there are two, this seems to be like there are two, two different visions here. There are, there's this idea that the state should not interfere in individuals freedom. And from an economic, economic perspective, neoliberals have that idea that states has no role to interfere either in the economy and also individual freedom. And they kind of tie the idea of economics with individual freedom. On the other hand, there are social democrats who believe that, that enhancing freedom relies on the role of state, the welfare state. But. But there's also this risk that the state might be. Might become too oppressive and restrict or curtail individual freedom. Can you tell us how do these, how did these two competing visions of the role of state shape European societies in the 20th century?
- [23:10]
C
Yes. So the key, the initial point is that there is no predominant modern concept of liberty anymore. Perhaps there was in the 19th century. Perhaps in the 19th century liberalism did really take the lead in defining what individual freedom meant and was challenged, but definitely kind of sustained that sort of discursive power for a long time. But in the 20th century, we have all kinds of political movements claim that they are maybe even superior in what they can offer to an individual engaged in a quest for individual freedom than liberalism. And one of these currents was actually social democracy. Because of more moderate versions of social democracy, early on wanted to build bridges to the more progressive variants of liberalism. And for that they had to assuage concerns that socialism was all about oppressing the individual. Though their message was that socialism was about expanding the scope of individual freedom. Liberal individual freedom might be good and important, but actually, owing to economic inequalities, it also only applied to maybe 10% of the society. That's the socialist argument. So it needed to be expanded. And there the argument was that although that is a form of negative freedom in the sense that if not if there's no state supporting them, working class people are dependent on the capitalist economy. They are subjected to an authoritarian educational system. That sort of shows the drums into them what their place in society is as a bottom of the social hierarchy. And if that can be changed through more progressive education, through a welfare state, then that frees people and also frees them from dependency on their families, because otherwise all they have to fall back on is family support. But if there's a welfare state, if there's social housing, for instance, they can afford to be more independent of their parents and another family, because they have a basis to live autonomously, make their own choices. And that's for instance, Sweden is a society that really establishes a social democratic welfare state much more, because it had that kind of ongoing absolute majority for a while, social democracy in Sweden, that sort of political predominance. And it's also one of the early countries that introduces no fault divorce in the 1960s. And with that idea that that makes people, women in that case, also more independent. It enables them to get out of a marriage if that's their free decision. But the tension there is that social democracy also means standardization. A welfare state standardizes. It also cannot treat everyone according to their perceived personal needs. First of all, that's difficult to realize for millions of people, for entire societies. And all of that would introduce a subjective factor and more an arbitrariness where one gets more than the other. And of course, standardization is about securing, expanding the scope for individual freedom for everyone. But with a necessarily standardized sort of system in which that takes place. And that's from the 70s, very much challenged, a challenge by neoliberal liberals. Of course, they see the state as stifling as oppressive as against individual freedom in the sense of personal initiative, but also in. You have similar. Not similar, but kind of from another angle, a broadly similar critique from the new left which also tends to see, say social democracy, that means huge housing blocks in social housing. That's an oppressive environment and that's not what we want. We want communal living spaces, perhaps squatted old buildings. So social democracy gets in a sense challenged from different sides. Also from feminists who say this was a male centered, nuclear, family centered idea and that's no longer something we find acceptable. So in that sense it's eroded as a, as an idea that social democracy can really provide individual freedom for the vast majority. And that would otherwise in practice, in reality be denied the realization of individual freedom because they don't have the economic means. So it's a very powerful idea. But you can also see why from the 70s it got under, increasingly under pressure. And then that was the focus of that section that's entitled Social Democratic Liberty. But social democrats were, with exceptions such as Sweden, never really the dominant political force for any extended period of time, because other currents, conservatives, Christian Democrats in much of Europe were also very strong.
- [29:02]
B
I'm interested to ask you, I want to pick up on this topic you just mentioned about neoliberals idea of freedom and social democrats. It's. It's of course, of course a big topic or controversy about this in the United States, but in Europe, mainly Scandinavian countries, they have, as you mentioned, they have a very strong tradition of social democracy with states providing positive and playing a positive role, providing welfare, social welfare, more or less, let's say, the economic inequality is not as wide as it is in the states or countries like England or New Zealand, Australia, where I live in. But do you think that strong tradition of social democracy is being eroded with. I'm particularly thinking of it in the past couple of years with the rise of more right wing politicians in, even in countries like Sweden.
- [29:59]
C
Yes, these right wing populists whom you allude to also have a notion of individual freedom. And that is partly what makes. It makes these currents so powerful. There's a book by two German sociologists and by the title of Freiheit, which translates as offended freedom. So people who have an idea of individual freedom and feel constantly offended by this rule or that rule very strongly during the COVID years, where they felt these restrictions are an undue restrictions of my individual freedom. And because I'm not willing to accept that, I tend to deny that Covid is a serious threat that needs to be dealt with collectively or they are now environmental regulations and, and all the things that make it in many European cities make it more difficult to move about with a car. And that is a restriction of my freedom to which automobility is central. So because there are all these different notions, it's very difficult for social democrats to address them. And there's also tendency in social democracy to say we find this notion of individual freedom inflated. There's been too much emphasis on that due to all this neoliberalism. We need to go back to collective freedom. So whether or not they would be electorally better off by saying we're doing something for individual freedom, individual freedom needs social housing unless they can afford housing on the market, which is increasingly difficult thing to do in many European cities, the more attractive ones, certainly the more sought after ones. So they are kind of a bit hesitant to really make that argument, to say, yes, we know that you, and we accept that you principally are thinking about yourself, your own freedom, your family's opportunities, but. Exactly that's why you should consider voting. Voting for us. Though whether I'm not an electoral strategist, that's of course not up to me to give political advice to any party. But I sometimes feel that this message to say we stand for collective freedom rather than individual freedom is simplistic and perhaps also sociologically naive because this quest for individual freedom is so rooted and so strong in, in modern societies, certainly 21st century ones that I think to go against it strikes me, yeah, strikes me as unpromising and that's just my assessment of the situation. But I think it's a point worth considering because there is a tradition all through the 20th century of also social democracy, but also more left wing, unorthodox communists and the New Left claiming, naming certain versions for individual freedom for themselves. So maybe that tradition deserves a second look, possibly a revival.
- [33:25]
B
Another question that I'm interested to ask about is the idea of work. Well, in the west or in social democracies, we, we believe that there is freedom, but there are others who argue that there is freedom, but you're not free at the same time because you're in chain to your, you're sort of, you know, metaphorically speaking, enslaved by your boss. You, you have, you have to work. You, when you're working, you sign a contract which restricts your individual freedom. It regulates even the time you work, wake up, the time you go to bed, the time you spend with your family. And you know, you can't really be a rebel because you have a mortgage. So you're in a way you're free, but not free in a capitalist system. Maybe this is a little bit anarchist as well, this, this line of argument. But in the book you also talk about this idea of work, which is both a constraint but also potential source of independence dependence. And that's paradoxical here. Can you talk about this and also tell us how the industrialization of Europe industrialization changed this perception of freedom at work?
- [34:43]
C
Yes, I think that underscores my initial point, citing Georg Simmel, that freedom is a matter of degrees and that is also a matter of perspective. So it very strongly depends on which sort of Europeans during which time you're looking at to then assess whether or not industrial labor is free, a source of freedom or brings about unfreedom. So if you start take as a Susie perspective or try to place yourself in the position of. Of an agricultural labor. These people were often heavily exploited. They were also much more controlled by landowners than they would be in cities. If you place yourself in the position of a maid or servant, domestic. There is one kind of memoir or interview passage where quote that I quoted from another book where a former maid recalls how she had to make breakfast in the evening, bring the tea and that she looked out of the window, saw the factory girls who could get out of the factory at six in the evening waiting for the bus and thought these are free young women and I'm not. Because from her perspective, they now their own time began at 6 o' clock where she was still expected to be available for any kind of service that her employer asked of her because she was a domestic servant. And another aspect, the absence of industrial work. In the 1950s in Sicily, one progressive Italian priest did a kind of social research, quoted a lot of of from conversation, not really systematic interviews, but it's very illuminating how these people say we have a shop here in Sicily, Palermo or somewhere, but we're so dependent on the few customers because there are many shops and few customers, because it's just not a very dynamic economy that we really have to humiliate ourselves in front of the customers, have to agree with them on everything they say about politics. One of these hairdressers, I believe, says, if the customer is a communist and I'm a communist, if the customer is a Catholic, then I'm Catholic because I have to please them, because otherwise they go elsewhere. So if you think about this position of humiliating dependency on whatever customer you can get, then you can also see why for these people working in factories, even assembly line work, 1960s style, a very Strong disciplinary regime with many aspects of unfreedom, no question about that. But still, relatively speaking, again in individual freedom. But then, of course, and then, yeah, yeah, short, short interruption here because I lost my train of thought. But then once people have industrial labor in a position of very low unemployment, they also gain freedom because they can then say if I don't like it, if I'm really not treated well in that factory versus another factories, that I'm just going to quit and look for another job. I know they're looking for people. So that actually really also weakens the control of the factory management of the foreman. But then there can also be the sense of we have to take over the factories and otherwise we cannot reconcile that with our idea of freedom. That's an idea that was very strong in 1968 in France and Italy especially because there, 1968 was not that much about students, also about students, obviously, but it was also about working class people and also took place in the factories. This idea of governing a factory, self government at factory level with the. Yeah, weakness, structural weakness of that kind of argument, that it was a burdensome things to do that many working class people were, after a brief kind of festive break from the normal factory routines, were quite happy to kind of pocket the gains, the higher wages that resulted from that situation of uncertainty for the employer. So they had to grant higher wages and don't go back to the normal routine. And also these experiments, yes, face the problem of again rising unemployment in the 1970s, which again made people often dependent on factory labor and weakened their position in trying to rethink what factory labor could even mean and to make it more compatible with an idea of a self governed existence.
- [40:09]
B
That was a really comprehensive response to my question. Thank you very much. I'm keen to go back to the Second World War now and talk about the moral aspects of that idea of freedom. How after the World War, the Second World War, how do you think, what do you think the idea of a liberated life meant? And what were some of the moral norms, the shifting moral norms around this new idea of liberate liberated life?
- [40:40]
C
I think the end of the Second World War brought an enormous relief to societies that were that had been occupied by Nazi Germany. Think of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, societies that had spent years fighting it, Britain. And how this in fact sort of was in a sense also an idea of collective national liberation and individual individual liberation going in tandem of there being no contradiction between the two. Because individuals had a much. They didn't. They could go to the cinema if they wanted, there were no curfews anymore and they could in a sense have a free life within a nation that was now liberated from Nazi rule. That's a very powerful moment in the post war period. We also see how that quickly became more internally contested within these recently liberated societies. So how far would freedom go in a situation of ongoing scarcity? Would black marketeers not be abusing this freedom? Would the new freedom of women that I mentioned before, would that need to be curtailed? And there these shorn, this kind of shaving of female hair plays a big symbolic role. Is it not a threat to the social cohesion of. Of societies that are still very fragile? And then of course, with a Cold War, a different set of threats emerges. Is not, doesn't freedom now need to be defended against communist invasion, possibly. Or under communism, is communism able to deliver on its promise, which is also free? Free working class people from an authoritarian school system, from capitalist exploitation, from a repressive, brutal police? That was at least the initial promise and that was stood in competition with Western ideas of freedom as they only then emerged. A Western idea of freedom was of course very strongly a Cold War construction. So we can see in Isaiah Berlin's reflections on freedom in the 1950s, but in many others texts as well, that in the west, many weren't quite sure about whether their version of freedom was really deemed superior to the communist one by a majority of people, whether not millions of people would be susceptible to the communist temptation, as it were. And we also see that in the Cold War to defend one's individual freedom in line with the collective freedom against communism could also be demanding. Individual freedom could also undermine this idea. A concrete example of that is that in West Berlin, when in the 1950s, the borders to East Berlin were still sort of semi open. They were heavily controlled, but could go back and forth. Some even worked in one part of Berlin and lived in the other part. But there was a discourse about people who would just go to East Berlin because prices were lower there to get a cheap haircut, do a bit of shopping, groceries, and then return to West Berlin. So the discourse was these people don't quite understand the meaning of individual freedom. That's not the idea. You're supposed to support the economy here in isolated, surrounded by communism, West Berlin, rather than going to East Berlin just because the haircut is a bit cheap, cheaper. And so that was also seen as an attention. And then later on during the Cold War, and this idea was of course that of the peace movement, once a nuclear threat became More pertinent again in the 1970s and 80s to say what is our freedom verse if we risk being annihilated tomorrow in the event of a nuclear war? Is there even any meaningful freedom while we're still facing that threat? So that's also. But that's again, it's also demanding idea demands that people rethink their focus on consumption perhaps and demonstrate against nuclear armament instead. Whereas of course in the 1980s we also saw see a lot of unpolitical consumption or unpolitical, not Cold war related consumption in the sense of disco music emerging in the 1980s, in the sense of a focus on brands, clothing brands, for instance, shoe brands. And that's to the, to the dismay of many of these peace activists who said, how can people be so naive to now focus on whatever brand of shoe they're thinking of purchasing and wearing when we have this nuclear threat hanging over us? So we see that war, even the absence of actual war, was really up to 1990, really a major kind of focal point of how individual freedom was conceived and debated.
- [46:37]
B
And when it comes to freedom, there, there is this idea of excessive freedom or individuality. There's all. In your book you talk about transgressive selfhood. I'm keen to know what it means. What is the meaning of transgressive self within your. In the context of your research and what are the some of the consequences, unintended consequences of pursuing this sort of idea of selfhood?
- [47:05]
C
Yes, many ideas of individual freedom and how to secure it are based on a notion of the autonomous self governing individual. And then they try to push against any constraints they might be facing. And then they can do what they want because they are autonomous individuals. But the idea of behind transgression is what if this is also this very idea of an, of an autonomous self governing, self contained individual? What if that's not also restriction to freedom? What if the inner urges need to be liberated? The psyche, the sexual desire. How if. What if that isn't in need of liberation and not against any external consensus, not even only against a moral norm imposed perhaps by the church or something, but really against this very liberate from this very idea of an autonomous self. But that is initially an avant garde idea. So many artists, surrealists, they have this idea of expanding the scope of the ego by transgressing its established boundaries. And in these bohemian artist circles, of course, early on, this experimentation with drugs, for instance, as an expansion of your inner world. But. And then in the endeavors there's more room for that, especially in the 1960s and there are even certain cities. Amsterdam is a case in point where a lot of people come because soft drugs are, are widely available. The police is actually not officially, actually it's not officially legalized, but it's, it's tolerated in fact. So people come here to, to, to experience what, you know, what is an adventurous, exciting transgression by sleeping in a park, for instance, quite close to the city center. There were lots of, lots of, you know, hippies camping there in the park and experimenting with drugs, experiencing sexual liberation. But in the 1970s, that's, that's more. Becomes a more contested idea again. And not just from a conservative perspective on conservative voices that you know, never liked any transgression in the first place. It's also from, from within these circles that question the established consensus. For instance, a feminist argument against that is this transgressions? Is liberation, is it not something that's very male? And is it not predicated on the unproblematic availability of women for man's sexual pleasure? Shouldn't we question that idea very fundamentally? And then for a long time there was also this idea that, you know, a transgression should no longer be seen as a transgression because it should be seen as a normal thing. And that also applies to drug consumption, for instance, heroin consumption. But you know, at the same time the destructive self destructive consequences of heroin consumption become very obvious for all to see. It's also an idea again talking about sexuality is also an idea that pertain to sexual relations between adults and children. This idea being children are perfectly capable of self directed action in the realm of sexuality. They often even initiate sexual context as adults. This is a transgression. But why should it be seen as a transgression? Why should it not be seen as something perfectly normal? Shouldn't we just expand our idea, allow freedom to encompass the sexuality of children and teenagers? And that for a while had quite a lot of traction that idea within certain parts of society. The more for instance the Green Party in West Germany, they were early on also critics of that idea within the. Could that not be a very self interested argument that people who pursue sexual contacts with children used to justify themselves to kind of try to legalize what's actually very problematic. Can children really be enter consensual sexual relations or even teenagers? Shouldn't that be between adults? But for tompa, it had a lot of tractions in some parts of liberalism. Also the Liberal Party in West Germany and the Green Party and then the feminist critique also had really had an impact by the 1980s, to say that's unacceptable, that has. Imposes a completely unacceptable cost on children that is very likely to traumatize them, that kind of overshadow their entire adulthood and so forth. So these arguments emerge and I think they show that, you know, transgression. What's is transgression something that becomes mainstream, is in a sense no longer transgression, or is it about to become mainstream or many signs point to that. But then there's a backlash, and that's not necessarily conservative backlash, that can also hear a critique based on the consequences of one person's transgression for other persons and in particular children and teenagers.
- [52:50]
B
Another aspect of the book that I really like. You do talk about Europe, but you also include, you discuss colonization and countries that been liberated. I'm interested to know more about the idea of the colonized subjects, how they articulated the idea of individual freedom, what it meant for them, in what ways challenged the Europeans idea. European ideas of individual freedom.
- [53:20]
C
Yes. So I early on felt with a major shift in the broader historiography that's become old fashioned and outdated in fact to just see Europe as a sort of container that ends somewhere on the way to Istanbul and perhaps or in the Gibraltar's trade. And then everything else is no longer European history. Because the importance of colonialism way beyond the first World War, beyond even the second World War. And then after it was formally abolished, of course, decolonization remained partial and in any case had enormous repercussions for European societies, largely due to post colonial migration. And that was simply too important to ignore in my book. And at the same time I'm also not writing a global history of individual freedom. It would be fascinating, but I don't think I have what it would take to the languages, the real familiarity with non European histories to really write that. But I do think that colonialism is very important in that it comes with a notion of European freedom. A certain notion that Europeans who went to the colonies very often said I feel freer here than I would in Europe. I feel freer because Europe is in many ways an over regulated society. As if I'm in administration of the colonies. I can govern a territory, you know, with about a million people living there. I can of course have to follow certain rules, but I also have a lot of latitude. Whereas in London, Paris or the Hague, wanna see these metropoles, I'd be sitting in some office in a ministry. I'm much freer here. And also this notion of colonial self reliance which many kind of settlers had Farmers especially, that's a very strong idea of freedom. I mean, notwithstanding that idea, of course they did call in the colonial state whatever they felt under threat. But that didn't prevent them from thinking of themselves as especially free individuals because they would be setting up a farm, expanding it in a difficult environment, and they would be quite left to their own devices and derive pride from that. But at the same time, it's of course an idea that is communicated to the colonizers, is often communicated in a way that says you are already free because we have abolished slavery, we have liberated you and now you're free, so you don't have any further claim to individual freedom. And then also to saying we cannot quite accept you as a free individual on the same level as Europe, yet you need more time to develop. And of course a well known excuse to prolong colonial rule potentially indefinitely. And we have, in these colonized societies, we have increasingly as people who challenge that. There are different ways of challenging it. And there are voices that say we don't like this idea of freedom very much because it makes the young people question the authority of the elders and looking towards Europe, Europe for fashion and lifestyle. So we don't, don't. There are elders who say we don't like this idea of freedom very much as it's imported by the Europeans, because it makes the young people in our societies disrespect the elders, look towards European style fashions and ways of speaking and behaving. And that undermines what holds our society together. But they are also among the colonized subjects, people who claim individual freedom. They claim it for instance, against slavery. Because the argument of some of these early anti colonial intellectuals is that slavery has a heritage that still weighs on them. Their whole sense of inferiority because of their skin colors. That's a heritage of slavery. Even though slavery itself has been abolished, it still weighs on them, it still limits their freedom. It's something they're not taught about in these schools that are controlled by the colonizers and they need to recover. Individual freedom secured in the first place, defined it in the first place against that heritage. And it's also a disappointed claim, because it's a claim they say we are. Why should we be subjected to any kind of special treatment, especially certain humiliating punishments, if we are perfectly able to be free individuals ourselves, why can we not raise our children just like you are? Why do you say English is so great, but then you don't want us to speak it because you want to keep us in a lower position? So There are many challenges that have an individual freedom aspect. And among these anti colonial intellectuals, activists, we also see many who live in Europe where they are relatively speaking, real. Because while they do face a certain amount of prejudice, the legal status is different because there are no special laws applying to them. There might still be police repression on various grounds, but in principle it's a much more liberal environment in the 1920s in Paris, London, the Hague than it would be in any of these colonies. And then of course, the colonizers apply all kinds of pressures. They apply surveillance. They sometimes pressure the parents back in the colonies who might have, you know, an interest in the. In the coloid state and the colonial apparatus. Be some kind of, kind of bureaucrat to say we're not quite happy with what your son is. The activities your son has embarked on lately while studying here in our country. We'd really like you to have a. To write a letter to your son and admonish him to drop that kind of anti colonial activity. But there are also activists who moved to Berlin because Berlin at that point, Germany had lost its colonies, had no longer a stake of its own. So many could actually be quite free in Berlin. But also there they often see that it all amounts to denying individual freedom, being denied to the colonized. And that's also. I think, I haven't really pursued that angle. But I think it's a key reason why many of these new kind of currents of thought, Gandhi, African socialism, are more oriented towards the collective. It's I think, because they're often disappointed and feel however much we've been claiming individual freedom for decades, by now it's always denied to us. So we need to stop doing that and maybe develop something of our own.
- [61:06]
B
And I think it was to a more as towards the beginning of the interview when you talked about Isaiah Berlin, him being a Cold War liberal. The idea of individuality was very important during Cold War, especially among the liberals. But do you think that idea of individual freedom has more or less prevailed? And if so, but that idea has more recently also come under criticism or has become controversial in recent years. Can you discuss that idea of freedom?
- [61:43]
C
Yes, I think so. My book stops or perhaps as the chapters peters out of it because the historical literature on which I based myself principally is no longer there for the 1990s. So that's where it actually ends. So it's really about the 20th century. And in many ways I was reluctant to kind of then be. Try to be thorough for the 20th century and then be superficial and just write five pages on the time between the 1990s and now, which is 30 years after all. And be in a sense, yeah, superficial, maybe shorthand in my explanation, based on my own newspaper readings. I didn't really want to do that. But what I can do is to capture or recapitulate the 1990s more moment. Because at that time the Cold War and the opposition between communism and Western Europe and the threat of nuclear war, these were very structuring features of how individual freedom was experienced, striven for debated in the 20th century. And suddenly, unexpectedly, rather in the 1990s, that is gone. There are also other things that had eroded, other dimensions that were no longer as important. For instance, the definition of freedom against the moral norms represented by the churches that had in most European countries has had pretty much eroded by the 1970s, the 1990s, although the new left impulse of really rethinking independent individual freedom, factories, self organization, squatted houses, communal living had not quite disappeared, but had receded to the background, had possibly even were on the way of petering out a bit by the 1990s. So it seemed as though there was in a sense an ideological vacuum. Individual freedom was now there, everyone seemed to be liberated, or if not, it was kind of their personal problem. And, and. But there was no longer any forces restricting it. That ideological vacuum has since disappeared too. Initially it was often filled by neoliberals. I think that was in a sense their strongest moment in Europe in the 1990s, because there they could say, okay, there doesn't seem to be any kind of restriction on freedom, but there is a state that's kind of become overbearing, that's become overly bureaucratic, the tax is too much. So we direct these energies of demarcating individual freedom from something, we direct this towards a welfare state, because at that point there is not really the strong competing freedom narrative anymore. So that now we have a neoliberal one. So for a while that is important. But then also, for instance claims to individual freedom, freedom arising from anti racism, for instance, also became stronger. Is individual freedom not something that you cannot quite experience in the same way if you're not a white person in a European society? Because there are all these informal restrictions, even absent official racism and absent of the counter model of apartheid, which disappeared, in fact, we are left less free. That was the argument of these anti racist activists. Because we are not white and we are not treated differently in society, we have to be fearing violence. If you think of the upsurge in neo Nazi violence in Eastern Europe, especially also East Germany. So after 1990. So in a sense a lot of these debates are coming back in a different way. And the. Also the old argument is it really, can you really be free if you still live with your parents because you can't afford any place to live? And that's come back massively in the last decades. Doesn't individual freedom require a sort of better housing provision? And also now the threat of war to do with Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, is that something. Do we need to. To limit our freedom to defend it by. For. Yeah, for instance, by. Or especially by reintroducing conscription? Or is that an unacceptable restriction to our freedom? Is Russia really threatening our freedom or is that perhaps debatable? So all these that, you know, the luxury of conceiving of individual freedom independent of any prospect of a threat, of a military threat that has disappeared because the threat is there. However you deal with it, however you debate it, it's now a debate in the shadow of such a threat. In that sense, I think in 1990s were the end of the 20th century in any case, but certainly also in regard to the quest for individual freedom, because most of the things that this quest was going up against had disappeared or receded to the background. But since the situation has changed, the 1990s look more like a brief moment rather than end to a long history.
- [67:16]
B
I have one final question to ask. Generally, you argue that ordinary Europeans quest for freedom often clashed with collective projects. Do you see this, do you see echoes of this tension in today's political landscape, both in Europe and also in the United States? If I know that you don't write about United States, but if you care to talk about it a bit would be great as well. Do you see that tension between that individual freedom and more collective political projects?
- [67:50]
C
I would say that it didn't clash so much as to stand in tension. Often this could be a productive tension. Productive in the sense that any, any broader political project entails some kind of collective promise, a collective mobilization, a collective appeal, possibly also demands that places on people in. In the name of the collective, but it's dependent for its energy. Unless it really wants to rely on stifling energies and societies too much on that securing peace and order by repression, oppressive means, that is an option. And at some point we're seeing that. But the especially also horribly Nazi Germany was in many ways also trying to appeal to people's sense of individual freedom by saying that in many ways we liberate you from moral constraints. You can now take what you want you can basically plunder. As long as it's directed against occupied societies, marginalized, persecuted minorities, you can be freer. And you can also have a lot of latitude. The old system of the Weimar rig stifled you, it was far too bureaucratic. But now here, somewhere in occupied Eastern Europe, you can, you have freedom to do what you want. And though that's a very strong promise, and a promise that collective and individual freedom might not be in contradiction, but there are also other, other promises, very different ones. For instance, the new Left has a strong promise to say, let's think about reordering society in a way that doesn't lead to a clash between individual collective freedom, because ideally there's no contradiction between the two. And I've talked before about the social democratic promise, the liberal promise, though they're all relying on some kind of productive tension, not a complete commonality between individual and collective freedom, but more productive tension between the two. And I think because these projects have also, because they're so different and so contrasting, they've always made it difficult to arrive at some sort of broad consensus about what individual freedom is. And perhaps such a consensus isn't necessary. Perhaps it's sort of limiting freedom too much because it would need to be imposed. But I think also that because I stayed fairly close to houses, self understandings of contemporaries and tried to reconstruct those historically, I came away with a sense that constitutional safeguards, the freedom of others, of minorities, even in the eyes of people who do not themselves belong to these minorities, that that has often be a fairly a concern that wasn't shared by many people. So essentially these constitutional safeguards, so it seems, have long been accepted and maybe for other reasons, not so much because people were so invested in them, because you know, they felt in this society was working for them, the economy was allowing for more options, more freedom in a way. So the constitutional safeguards were accepted with that. And that's not the same as to say we have really majorities who are strongly invested in these constitutional safeguards. It's a very sobering conclusion, but I think recent developments show that a lot of people, possibly the majority of people in any society, just do not care so much about out constitutional safeguards for freedoms as long as their own freedom is not threatened. And so that's I think maybe not an optimistic message, but something we need to take very seriously. This possibility is that many people might feel freer, even though for large sectors of society the opposite is the case. So this is perfectly possible that after getting used to certain breaches of constitutional law to certain styles of executive rule. Really, majority of people feel their own freedom is not under threat. Perhaps they are more free, they're freer than they were before, and it's entirely possible that they feel that way, though the fact that others are not might not, you know, really appear that much anymore on their horizons, or it might be seen as an acceptable price to pay.
- [72:41]
B
Dr. Moritz Fulmer, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on your new Books network. Really enjoy talking to you about the book. It's a really good book and easy. It's not really like those difficult academic books. It's really, really easy to get into. The book we just discussed was the Quest for individual freedom a 20th century European history, published by Cambridge University Press. Thank you very much for your time, Moritz.
- [73:08]
C
Thanks, Mortesa. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [73:12]
A
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- [73:39]
C
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